Privacy and Cookie Policy for this website

Privacy

In common with most web sites, this site automatically logs information about every request made of it. This information is used for system administration, for bug tracking, and for producing usage statistics.

Relevant subsets of these data may be passed to computer security teams as part of investigations of computer misuse involving this site or other computing equipment in the University. Data may also on occasion be passed to the administrators of other computer systems to enable investigation of problems accessing this site or of system misconfigurations. Otherwise the logged information is not passed to any third party except if required by law. Summary statistics may be extracted from these data and some of these may be made publicly available, but those that are do not include information from which individuals could be identified.

In addition this site uses Google Analytics software, see below for details of the use of cookies as part of this tool. For further information on Google Analytics use of data please visit "How Google uses data when you use our partners' sites or apps" - www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/

Some areas of this website uses Adobe Flash Player. We do not record data on use of specific Flash Player files, only data on use of the page in which they may be embedded. You will find further information of the privacy policy for this player and help on altering the privacy settings for this player by following instructions at http://www.adobe.com/security/flashplayer/.

For the purpose of the UK Data Protection Act 1998, the 'Data Controller' for the processing of data collected by this site is the University of Cambridge, and the point of contact for subject access requests is the University Data Protection Officer (10 Peas Hill, Cambridge CB2 3PN).

Cookies

Cookies are small electronic files which a website can transfer to a user's hard drive to identify a user and personalise their use of that website. Our web server automatically collects standard information such as a user's IP address, browser type, operating system, access times, etc..

Raven is a service used by many web sites that provide resources for the University of Cambridge to identify people so that decisions (such as granting or denying access) can be made based on who that person is and on other information about them. Raven is provided by the University Computing Service, and uses standard Computing Service user identifiers (CRSid) and 'Raven passwords' to identify people.

There are two types of cookie in use on this site which are used to:

1. implement Raven's single sign-on facility which enables you to move between many Raven protected sites/sub-sections without having to re-enter your login credentials for each site.

2. implement Raven's sign-on facility on a site by site (sub-section by sub-section) basis, whereby you are prompted to re-enter your login credentials for each site.

University Computing Service believes that an exemption from obtaining explicit consent is applicable to the Raven server service relating to a users' use of Raven within a single browser session. Note that this exemption DOES NOT apply to persistent cookies that may be set by any user in their Raven account administration page at:

Note that the default behaviour for Raven is to not use a persistent cookie. Persistent cookies are only set at the users' request, in doing so the user gives their consent for this and University Computing Service has updated the Account Management interface to make this clear.

The University of Cambridge Raven Privacy and Cookie policy is hosted at https://raven.cam.ac.uk/privacy.html and here you will find full details of the cookies used on this site and what information is stored.

2. Indirect collection of information: Google Analytics

This site uses Google Analytics software which places cookies on a user's device to provide us with aggregated usage data of the website. Google Analytics uses first-party cookies to track visitor interactions. These cookies are used to store information, such as what time the current visit occurred, whether the visitor has been to the site before, and what site referred the visitor to the web page. These cookies do not collect information that identifies a visitor. Browsers do not share first-party cookies across domains. Analytical cookies allow us to count the number of visitors to our website, and to see how users move around the site when they are using it. This helps us to improve the quality of the delivery of our web materials. No personal information is collected or retained by means of the cookies used to generate this statistical information.

The cookies for Google Analytics are created automatically unless the user’s browser is set to refuse them. Users can set their browsers to accept or reject all, or certain, cookies. All recent versions of popular browsers give users a level of control over cookies. Further detail on how to control how webservers use cookies on your computer (including Google Analytics cookies) is available on the AboutCookies.org website, which contains a guide to deleting and controlling cookies.

As a user you can prevent Google Analytics collecting traffic log data. To provide website visitors with more choice on how their data is collected Google Analytics has developed the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on. The add-on communicates with the Google Analytics JavaScript (ga.js) to indicate that information about the website visit should not be sent to Google Analytics.

If you want to opt out, download and install the add-on for your current web browser. To do so please visit the following site which provides a browser add-on that enables a user to opt out - http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. The Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on is available for Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Opera.

3. Third party collection of information: Social networking

Some third party cookies may be set by services that appear on our pages. They are set by the operators of that service and are not in our control. They are set by Flickr and YouTube and relate to the ability of users to share content on this site on those social networking sites. For more information on these cookies you should consult the relevant websites for each service.